A couple of months back, Bloomfield – who goes by JudgyBitch1 on Twitter – decided for some reason that she could best serve AVFM’s social media directing needs by straight-up libeling feminist writer Jessica Valenti – by making up inflammatory quotes and attributing them to Valenti in a series of Tweets. She later boasted in on her blog that the quotes – which she admitted she’d conjured out of thin air – had inflamed hatred of Valenti and caused her to catch “a bit of hell.”

Now Bloomfield is pulling the exact same stunt again. This time, her target is feminist cultural critic and #GamerGate bete noire Anita Sarkeesian.

On Saturday, Bloomfield tweeted an obviously doctored “screenshot” of a tweet that Sarkeesian never made.

How do we know this is fake? Well, whoever made this fake screenshot made one glaringly obvious mistake: this Tweet is way too long to be a real tweet. Twitter, as you probably know, has a strict limit on the number of characters you can use in a Tweet. 140. This fake tweet has 218.

Here’s what happened when I typed the same text into Twitter myself: as you can see, I went over the limit by 78 characters. That’s, uh, a lot.

As you can see, the “Tweet” button is disabled; it’s simply impossible to post Tweets that are too long.

Looking back through Sarkeesian’s Twitter timeline, I found the real Tweet that she posted at 2:32 PM on the 29th of September.

As you can see, not only does the time match, but the numbers of favorites and retweets is roughly the same as well; there have only been a handful more added since the fake screenshot was made. Whoever made the fake tweet obviously just screenshotted this real tweet and then pasted in new text using the same font used by Twitter.

The sheer incompetence is astounding.

Did Bloomfield make this Tweet herself, or did she simply pass along a fake screenshot she found somewhere else?Well, Google Images couldn’t find any other instances of this fake screenshot on the internet; Bloomfield appears to be the first person to post it. Which suggests that either she or someone she knows made it – or someone else made it and sent it to her, and she posted it on the internet without checking to see if it was real.

Given her proclivity for making up quotes and attributing them to her enemies, I’m going to take a wild guess and say that I think she had something to do with creating the fake screenshot.

EDIT: Bloomfield says she found the screenshot on Facebook, on a page called Feminist Crazy Quotes, where it seems to have first appeared. Here’s her Facebook repost of it. It’s not clear where Feminist Crazy Quotes got it, as I can’t find any other instances of the tweet on the internet using Google Image search. It’s still not clear why the supposed “social media director” of AVFM, a woman who seems to spend half her life on Twitter, would not immediately realize that the Tweet was way too long to be a real Tweet.

If you scroll down through the responses to Bloomfield’s tweet, you’ll notice that Bloomfield’s fans ate this blatant deception right up; inclined to believe the worst about Sarkeesian, they easily convinced themselves that this preposterous, overlong, literally impossible tweet was real. And Bloomfield was in the thick of it, egging on their hate.

@JudgyBitch1@femfreq Does this twat ever NOT complain about anything? Her vagina must be dryer than California's crops this year

It goes without saying that Sarkeesian is not, in fact, a radical feminist.

When a few other tweeters pointed out the obvious – that Sarkeesian’s alleged tweet was in fact way too long to be a real tweet – Bloonfield fell back on the same “logic” she used when she was called out for making up quotes about Valenti: well, she may not have said this, but doesn’t it sound like something Sarkeesian would say?

https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/518541193169616896

No she wouldn’t. She didn’t. If she had, you wouldn’t need to use a fake screenshot to demonize her.

Amazingly, even after the tweet had been revealed to be fake, even after JB was reduced to claiming it was a “Poe” – just as she did with the fake Valenti quotes – the hatefest continued on, with dozens more tweets from JB’s peanut gallery denouncing Sarkeesian for her imaginary racism.

Here are just a few of them:

@JudgyBitch1@femfreq Your racism is more disgusting than the anime that comes out of Japan. That's why you only cater to white women.

And while most the overwhelming majority of this defamation comes from angry men, some of it comes from angry women – like Janet Bloomfield — who are every bit as dishonest and abusive as their male counterparts.

Comments

Yeah, I’ve heard pretty bad things about the Crystal thread, although apparently it’s mostly the “anime fans are not very good at critical art discussion” stuff that usually occurs there than people making dumb complaints about feminism/apologism for noted sexist elements.

Also, if we’re talking abut animu against janet, I vote for Utena, even if most of the stuff in there that she would decry would go completely over her head.

It’s also possible that whoever initially faked the tweet simply went into the HTML of the page and changed the text content. I just went to Janet’s twitter page and easily altered the text of her most recent tweet (the one about Jlaw’s nudes) in about thirty seconds by using the console in Chrome:

While real women are suffering, dying, feminism is placing MRAs at the center of discourse. The feminist convo is completely derailed as scarce energy & resources are being wasted on this.

Ah, another concern troll. Haven’t seen one of those in, like, seven and a half minutes or so.

I couldn’t quite decide on a response that would capture all of the ”WTF” I experienced while reading this comment, so here’s all four I came up with. Enjoy the bonus content!

1) Yes, it is utterly impossible to both help women and bring to light, deconstruct and mock misogynistic beliefs that help perpetuate sexism and discrimination in society. It can’t be done. A choice is mandatory. No middle ground.

2) Having fun while dealing with terrible people with their terrible beliefs is doing feminism wrong! Why aren’t we doing our best to perpetuate the common misconception of feminists as humorless free speech hating hysterics? Where is our sense of not challenging stereotypes? Verily, feminism has lost its way.

3) Where are these ”scarce energy and resources” you’re talking about? Feminism could sure use some of those, seeing that the philosophy of feminism does indeed not possess vast resources such as gold mines or oil fields. Anyway, what does that even mean? How is laughing at stupid reactionaries and their ridiculous ideology “wasting resources”? You’re making no sense.

4) A single blog on the internet does, indeed, represent all of feminism and its discourse. Feminists doing something else besides spending literally all of their free time volunteering is a sign of feminism’s failure. Wehuntedthemammoth.com is the true and only face of modern feminism. Building a community where people feel safe is wrong as long as even one person is suffering in the world, which is why a rational person should never even try to change the world, only sit at home playing Minecraft like a good citizen.

These were just a few I came up with. I’m sure there are many more. And yes, this post was a bit on the sarcasm heavy side, in case you were wondering.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go do something more valuable to waste precious feminist energy and resources on. Like playing Minecraft, which is, apparently, much more noble and useful a task than pointing out flaws in the misogynistic mindset.

I don’t mind if others are satisfied without analyzing the contents of the fake tweet. It’s relevant to me because my hobby is reading in Japanese, and as a fan of anime, I would like to read more light novels. These (along with adult visual novels) are becoming the basis for an increasing number of anime. But more and more of them are written by otaku giving form to their fantasies—fantasies which are deeply sexist and do promote rape culture. Like how the hero must always humiliate the female characters by seeing them naked or getting a glimpse of their panties or groping their breasts “accidentally.” Or like how they are generally portrayed as being there for the “nice guy” Gary Stu hero to choose from. (Often, they literally fall from the sky.) They end up doting on the hero in grotesquely unrealistic ways (even if they started out hating him a few chapters earlier) and deferring to his wisdom in everything. Most of them hold extremely traditional values towards relationships and gender roles, and they’re required to express a virginal innocence that gets violated at regular intervals throughout the series (which somehow doesn’t ever lead to character development).

I could go on forever, but the point is, you can bet that MRAs and other Sarkeesian-haters favor this kind of otaku-oriented anime and want to protect it, and that’s no doubt what whoever wrote the fake tweet had in mind. They probably wanted to portray feminist criticism of anime as extremist overreaction to innocent media, but their creation, while hyperbolic and over-broad, is not nearly as far off the mark as they surely intended.

Thanks, Anarchonist – it’s been great so far seeing an Internet community that’s actually nice to one another 🙂 It was only very recently brought to my attention that using words like ‘crazy’ to describe violent, wrong-headed people was problematic for those who were genuinely mentally ill, and I’m slightly paranoid that I might have used the word incorrectly here already!

I’m looking forward to keeping up with discussion – I’ve been aware of increasing hostility from GamerGate and the like for some time, and having reasonable people around makes it so much easier to cope with mentally.

Thanks, Anarchonist – it’s been great so far seeing an Internet community that’s actually nice to one another 🙂 It was only very recently brought to my attention that using words like ‘crazy’ to describe violent, wrong-headed people was problematic for those who were genuinely mentally ill, and I’m slightly paranoid that I might have used the word incorrectly here already!

I’m looking forward to keeping up with discussion – I’ve been aware of increasing hostility from GamerGate and the like for some time, and having reasonable people around makes it so much easier to cope with mentally.

It is kind of nice to find a group of people that generally tries to support one another isn’t it? I know I’ve made the error of using ableist terms here a few times, as long as you’re genuinely apologetic when it’s pointed out and try to keep from repeating it most of the regulars here tend to be understanding.

Ah, @judgybitch1. She made some snarky, uneducated, off-point remark on one of my posts once. I promptly blocked her. I had no idea she was famous for this! I feel privileged to have had the chance to block someone so vile. 😀

It was only very recently brought to my attention that using words like ‘crazy’ to describe violent, wrong-headed people was problematic for those who were genuinely mentally ill

Yes, we Mentally-Interesting peeps have enough stigmatization going on without being equated with abusive asshats… ;p

Wow, I had a very strange idea…probably the product of too much caffeine and too little sleep.
…Someone start a twitter account that claims to be Bloomfield… then tweet kittens, puppies, flowers and uplifting bons mots.

I remember when judgybitch commented on Slate, back in the day when Slate still allowed comments. It was pretty much what you’d expect, but one day, she commented on the issue of school districts that prohibit parents from sending foods to school containing peanuts or peanut products.

Hoo-boy.

She so furiously foamed at the mouth about peanut allergies being the problem of people who have them, so hatefully protesting the minor inconvenience of only giving her kids peanut-free snacks, a creepy thought occurred to me: without that no-peanut policy, judgybitch would be putting peanuts in EVERYTHING she sends to school, and probably smearing her kids in peanut oil, too, just so she could stick it to those kids who have peanut allergies and their “entitled” parents. Because what good is having unfettered access to stuff that can put another child in an ICU unless you get to use it and thereby show you are superior or something? You know, misogyny is one thing. I am convinced that it’s reflexive for a lot of people who have merely been conditioned that it’s normal and don’t know any better. But lamenting that you can’t poison a bunch of kids? That’s just straight-up as evil as it gets. She isn’t stupid, she isn’t misguided, she isn’t deformed by her middle-class neighborss disdain for her stayathomemomness or whatever; she is just fucking evil. She hates people, pure and simple. Misogyny is just a subset of that overwhelming hatred; organized misogyny is an outlet for it.

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